PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Announcer : 00:00 Steve Barkley ponders out loud is sponsored by the AAIE Institute for International School Leadership. Preparing educators for the unique challenge of international school leadership through online courses led by international school leaders. Learn more at aaieinstitute.org.

Steve [Intro]: 00:19 Hello and welcome to the Steve Barkley ponders out loud podcast. For over three decades, I’ve had the opportunity to learn with educators at all levels, both nationally and internationally. I invite you to listen as I explore my thoughts and learning on a variety of topics connected to teaching, learning, and leading with some of the best and brightest educators from around the globe. Thanks for listening in.

Steve: 00:46 Coaching Better Podcast interviews Steve Barkley, part two. In this second part of the interview conducted by Kim Cofino and Clint Hamada, I have the opportunity to discuss the differing roles that coaches play from peer coach to expert coach and we explore adjusting your coaching approach to the teacher that you’re working with. When does a coaching model fit and when does the coach stray from a format or model to respond to the personalized request of the teacher that you’re working with?

Steve: 01:45 We examine how the focus on student learning production behaviors can allow coaches to play many different roles. I hope you enjoy our conversation.

Steve: 02:00 You know, first of all, a lot of people ask about my “model of coaching” and you’ll struggle reading my stuff because there’s — I don’t have a model. I chose to focus on the skillsets of the coach and for me the key is for the coach to build the model that’s coming at the request of the teacher. So I can show you a video clip where I’m working with a new beginning teacher who’s nervous and scared and I dump a ton of approval statements on her about all the great things she’s doing. And then I can show you another clip where I don’t give the teacher a single piece of approval. All I do is present some things that I saw. And you know, what’s the model? The model is who I’m working with.

Steve: 02:53 That nervous beginning teacher needs a ton of positive feedback to build up her confidence in the thinking that she’s doing. The other teacher, if I gave her approval, she’d actually resent it. Thinking I was putting myself in some kind of advisory evaluative position. She didn’t need it from me. So the key is listening and you know, my big word is agenda. As a coach, I need to uncover the teacher’s agenda and I need to work with the teacher’s agenda. And I’m listening to the teacher to guide me into the kind of coaching that the teacher is requesting in our current, in our current relationship.

Kim: 03:42 What are some key – and you may not have an answer for this, I’m not sure if this question is reasonable or not. What are some key things to look out for as you’re listening to be guided by the teacher? Are there some key phrases, some key, even like posture changes, anything that the coach can be like, “oh, this is what they really want,” that you have noticed or could reference?

Steve: 04:04 Well, I’m always reading people to look for interests. And in my consulting work I’m often telling stories about other things I’ve done, other places I’ve been, and I’m looking for the person’s response to one of the stories which tells me they’ve got interest there. And that’s where I am with a teacher. I’m looking to find that spot of interest. And that’s where it takes me into the teacher’s agenda. And then getting the teacher to describe the future the teacher wants to see. My work is built heavily around changing student behaviors because students are the ones that cause learning. The teacher doesn’t cause the learning, the student causes the learning. But the teacher has to create the behaviors in the student that will cause the learning. So when I can get teachers to describe to me what it is they want to have their learners doing, what’s the difference between what your learners are doing now and what you want them to be doing, and then what are your thoughts on how we get there? And I can tell when you don’t have a thought of what you possibly could do to get there, then that’s the spot for me to throw out an idea that I have. But I’m going to try and pull your ideas first if you have them and I can reinforce them or I can work with you to refine them. But if you know that what we’re working to do is to create a picture that you’ve told me you want, then that’s how I know I’m working from your agenda.

Clint: 06:04 That simple question of what is the future you want to see? And then coupled with what are the behaviors that you will see from your students when you are envisioning that future. I think those two things –

Steve: 06:19 Let me add a line there because I want to differentiate because [inaudible] said are the same. So the same as what’s the future that you want to see and what would your kids be doing that tells you you’re there. But the critical one is, what do the students have to do to get there? And that’s the one that I’ve been labeling as learning production behaviors. So if you told me that you wanted to be able to play this piece of music for a concert, and I see where you are now in your skillset as a music instructor, I can come up with the things that you need to be doing that will cause you to get to where you want to be.

Steve: 07:00 So as a math teacher, I need to be in the same spot. Where’s the future — what I want to see my students do, they can’t do that now. What is it that I need to get them doing? So sometimes when I’m working with a new teacher, they don’t know what that is and that’s really a struggle. I’ve tried to design instruction and the purpose of my instruction is to get you to do something and I can’t even clearly identify what that thing is that you need to do. And then as a coach, that’s the part I have to help the new person figure out. We have to know what we got to get the kids to do before we can start figuring out what teacher behaviors I’ll take on in order to get that behavior.

Clint: 07:44 Kim, that’s something you wanted to ask earlier.

Kim: 07:48 I just wanted to say I really — that whole approach that you have of sharing the vision of where you want the teachers to go and having that be the agenda that you’re trying to follow and listening for the clues from what they’re talking about, assigns you your role in the conversation that – like, I just love that because I feel like that’s — coaches and teachers need that flexibility to be in the moment and recognize what’s needed in this moment as opposed – I often struggle with like frameworks and models because I feel like they don’t always work for every person, every situation. And so this ability to be able to be flexible and if both parties understand that there is flexibility in that conversation and in that framework you’re working within, I just think that that is the way that allows the coaching to be most personalized as opposed to most formalized. I don’t know if that’s the opposite, but that’s how it’s like shaping up in my head.

Steve: 08:46 Yeah. Let me give you an example that might illustrate that for you. So I’m real big on what I call a student production behaviors. So when I’m coaching a teacher, I’ll ask the teacher in a pre-conference, one of the questions I’ll ask is, what’s the most important thing you need to get kids to do during the lesson today? So a teacher might say to me, “well, I need the kids to understand.” And as soon as she says that word, understand, I’ll call timeout. Understand is the outcome. So the kids are coming in the door not understanding. You want them to walk out the door understanding. So tell me what is it that kids will do that you think is going to produce the understanding? Okay? And then that’s what I can work from. So if I were to use your model, I work with a principal who collects lesson plans from teachers, but he doesn’t want the word teacher in the lesson plan. He doesn’t want any description of what the teacher’s going to do in the lesson plan. The only thing he wants in the lesson plan is what the kids are going to do. Okay?

Steve: 09:52 So while he doesn’t want the teacher to be stuck with the framework of having defined what she’s gonna do when 10 minutes into the lesson, it’s obvious that’s not the thing to be doing. And his assumption is, as a teacher, you’re going to do whatever you got to do to move the kids there. So now if you took that framework and you put it in as a coach, if you’re stuck in a framework where you’re following the steps of the process or the framework, rather than reading the message you’re getting from the teacher you’re working with, that that needs to change or modify. So it’s exactly like a teacher having a lesson plan, but moving off of it by reading the kids. A coach goes into a post-conference with a plan based on what you know the teacher wants to accomplish but during that process you’re going to be reading the teacher and modifying and adjusting your behaviors to get from the teacher the behaviors the teacher needs for her own understanding or insight or growth or wherever the process is taking her.

Clint: 11:09 As a coach, how do I get — I guess I’m struggling and I’m gonna push back a little bit. You know, it’s like you have to know when to bend the rules and when to break the rules and when to step out of this role and when to go into that role. I feel if I’m a new coach, new to the role, does the frameworks help me to just kind of understand the limits of those frameworks and then I can start breaking them, or do you think as a coach, I could really just – I’m thinking of like jazz improvisation, right? I can just supervise from the beginning or do I have to learn the scales and the rest before I can start improvising?

Steve: 11:48 Yeah, I think you know the answer, don’t you?

Clint: 11:51 Don’t do that to me.

Steve: 11:55 It’s like saying can someone be a natural teacher.

Steve: 11:59 Yeah. I’m sure there’s some natural moves, but as a teacher, each instructional strategy that you study and explore, you add to your repertoire and then that makes you more highly skilled as a teacher to pull the right thing at the right time. So I would say the same thing for a coach. I’d study all the models. I’ve been at this a lot of years and I’m constantly learning and sticking new things in, both things that I’m finding by studying coaching, but also things that I’m finding by studying psychology, studying neuroscience, studying new learning elements, that it’s all adding to having the ability to listen more closely and then have more options available while you’re listening. You know, the difficulty a new teacher has is they have a lesson plan and that’s all they have. And until they can get home that night and rethink it, they’re stuck carrying out what they did. The more experienced the teacher gets, the more things he or she has in their pockets and they can read a situation in front of them and drop the move that they were working on and switch it over to another one.

Kim: 13:22 And I think that’s why it’s so important, I guess, personally that as coaches, we look at so many different models for coaching so that you can pick and choose and pull. And I have noticed in some of the communities that I am a member of, that there’s like, what is the word — I can only think of like dogged acceptance to one specific model. I always get a little nervous.

Steve: 13:45 It’s that ugly word called fidelity freaks me out. You know, I’m the same way with protocols. You know, protocols are good until you’re using them when you shouldn’t be using them or your group has gone beyond the protocol. You know, like a lot of the work I’ll do with professional learning communities. If a group is struggling and they don’t know how to get started in having a conversation, a protocol’s a great tool to assist them in getting started. But once they’ve built a relationship and they’ve built the skills, now the protocol actually ends up holding them back from where they could be going. An interesting metaphor that I use with that – I worked with a teacher who at the beginning of the year, had her rules on sentence strips hanging up in the room. And her goal was as quickly as possible to be able to take the rules down and put them away. Because as the students became a community of learners, you would no longer need to these rules. The rules were just in place as a structure when we don’t know each other to help us get started. And every now and then the kids would mess up and she’d have to get a rule back out and put it back up. We need a little more practice on this. I think of protocols and frameworks the same way. A great way to get started, learn the strategy, be cautious not to stick in it too long.

Kim: 15:17 Such a good point.

Steve: 15:19 Now, I talk about – I did a lot of work with people, identified what I was calling technical coaching, collegial coaching, now I’ve lost the name for it, but a problem solving coaching. And so technical generally went with staff development. When you were learning something new and you were implementing it and you got that technical feedback. Collegial coaching – more designed to get people to know and learn about each other through the coaching. So knowing each other was more important than what actual coaching we were doing. And then problem solving coaching, you know, we had a struggling learner and so we’re observing in each other’s classrooms [inaudible]. And I always suggest that if you knew the three of those, and then sometimes I had cognitive coaching on to as a fourth outside that, it’s figuring out what is it that the person I’m working with is looking for. So even if we’re peer coaching and you’re looking for some technical feedback and I’m looking for collegially getting to know you, we can end up in a coaching relationship where each of us is giving the other person what we want and both of us getting frustrated by it.

Steve: 16:33 But if I can listen so that I know what it is you’re looking to gain from the coaching and you know what I’m looking to gain from the coaching, then we can actually be in a peer coaching relationship that is giving each other the piece We’re requesting back.

Kim: 16:49 So in that sense, it’s almost important that all of the staff understand these different models of coaching.

Steve: 16:57 Yeah. I’ll give you one in front of the history, okay?

Steve: 16:59 Years ago, and I forgot the technical term that was used to describe it, but it was – oh, teacher expectation. They had identified a set of behaviors that that showed teacher expectations. So if teachers had high expectation, they gave kids more wait time, they got closer proximity to kids. They actually touched kids more often. Okay? And the researchers that identified that, and so they started a coaching program where teachers would go into each other’s classrooms and look at these things one at a time. Like, I’ll come in and make a map and the only thing I’ll do is record, where were you physically over 45 minutes. So there was a spot in the room you never got to. Well, when people start that program, people would love it and within 18 months, everybody was second tired of it and wanted nothing more to do with it. And it’s because in the midst of getting that technical feedback, a problem grew up that you would like to collaborate on, but you were stuck in the framework of not going there. I wanted to find out about you more about you collegially but we were stuck in this framework and it was a great framework to start. It was safe – it got people understanding how to use feedback, but frequently people stayed in it too long.

Clint: 18:25 Sounds like the the moral of the story is to embrace fluidity. I think these concepts are very fluid in how we flow back and forth from one framework to another or from one focus to another and being willing and able and being cognizant. Right? I think it takes an amount of, sort of emotional intelligence or just kind of social intelligence to know Kim or Steve are not interested in what we’re talking about. Now I need to find out what they’re interested in. And as a coach, that’s my responsibility. It’s not necessarily always going to be the responsibility of the teacher that I’m working with.

Steve: 19:03 And experienced teachers have gotten caught in that pendulum swing. So we swung over here and then when we left it to come over here, we dropped everything we were doing over there instead of figuring out what were the critical learning pieces that we wanted to keep in place and keep getting better and better and better by things we’re learning each time.

Kim: 19:26 What’s that flexibility and that ability to articulate why and when we’re doing what we’re doing. And I think that’s sometimes how we get in that pendulum swing. We make the shift, but we forget to decide like, oh, we’re making this shift because of X. When Y happens, we’re going to do, you know, A. Whatever the case may be. So I think that could go in along with the fluidity that you’re pointing out. I think that articulation or that explicitness of being able to say, this is what we’re doing now. This is why we’re doing it now. Here’s how we’re going to get to doing it this way and we have the ability to go all these other options too is really important.

Steve: 20:01 I kind of describe a model like that in classroom management. The best teacher knows his or her style and they are consistent with their style so that the kids can work with that consistency. But the outstanding teacher is capable of stepping outside of his or her style when they have a student who needs them to do that. And I would say the same is true of instructional leaderships in schools. You know, as a school principal, here’s your style and you’re consistent and the teachers know it. But man, there’s sometimes there’s great teachers. And to keep those great teachers on your staff, you gotta be able to step of your style for that great teacher. And I think the same thing is true with coaches. Coaches all have their natural style and that natural style is going to work terrific with these people on these issues, but am I willing to read the situation and see that I can advance that teacher’s impact on her students further by my willingness to step out of my style.

Kim: 21:09 You really, through this whole conversation, you really highlighted and articulated so clearly the critical need for coaches to be responsive to the people that they’re coaching and I think that that is why the frameworks maybe can be a challenge to that because it’s so much harder to be so responsive. I think that understanding of how to be responsive and how to learn to be responsive and step out of maybe your comfort zone is like kind of a next level thinking about coaching professional development, right? Like, okay, I know all these various models, but how do I take myself out of the way that I do things so that I can meet the needs of all of the teachers that I work?

Steve: 21:47 Yep. You got it.

Kim: 21:49 Cool. I feel like that was an amazing, super deep conversation. We never even got to our planned questions, but what we talked about was fabulous and I’m very conscious of your time. So thank you so much.

Steve: 21:58 Well thank you. I’m glad we had a chance to record it. I appreciate your interest.

Kim: 22:06 It is our pleasure. 100%. Thank you so much for your time today.

Steve: 22:10 You bet. Take care.

Kim: 22:11 You too.

Steve: 22:11 Bye bye.

Clint: 22:12 Thanks so much, Steve.

Steve: 22:15 I greatly appreciate the time and energy that Kim and Clint put into conducting the interview for this podcast. You can find a video clip of the podcast on their site and I’m sure that we’ll team up again in the future to explore our ongoing learning about coaching to build teacher learning to impact student learning. Thanks for listening in.

Steve [Outro]: 22:53 Thanks again for listening. You can subscribe to Steve Barkley ponders out loud on iTunes and Podbean and please remember to rate and review us on iTunes. I also want to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on twitter @stevebarkley or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.

PODCAST TRANSCRIPT

Announcer : 00:00 Uncover how your students learn best with the Kaleidoscope Profile. Available in both print and online formats, K-scope reveals the sensory styles, perceptual styles and temperament styles that influence how individual students prefer to work and view the world. Discover more at plsclasses.com/kscope.

Steve [Intro]: 00:18 Hello and welcome to the Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud podcast. For over three decades, I’ve had the opportunity to learn with educators at all levels, both nationally and internationally. I invite you to listen as I explore my thoughts and learning on a variety of topics connected to teaching, learning and leading with some of the best and brightest educators from around the globe. Thanks for listening in.

Steve: 00:50 Coaching Better Podcast interviews Steve Barkley, part one. I had the great opportunity to be interviewed by Kim Cofino and Clint Hamada at Better Coaching. And you’ll find their website contact information in the lead in to our blog. Kim and Clint have each, 20 plus years of international education experience working as coaches and they offer a podcast and a video clip and training programs especially geared for international coaches, but open to everyone. In the first half of the interview, Kim and Clint give me the opportunity to discuss changing cultures of schools to include more of a coaching culture, the deep privatization of classrooms. We explore the role of teacher leaders by building trust for a coaching environment. And we look at when the coach is in a position to work from their expertise and when a coach needs to hold back some on expertise and making those decisions to match the desires of a teacher. I hope you enjoy the conversation.

Kim: 02:37 All right. Welcome back to another Coach Better podcast. Today, I am super excited – Clint and I are both super excited because we’re here with Steve Barkley and Clint and I have both been following and reading and learning from Steve for so many years so it’s like a super honor/pleasure for us to be interviewing Steve on this call today. And I know that most of our listeners know who Steve is but I’m going to put him on the spot and ask him to share a little bit about himself and his education and coaching experience just so we have that straight from his actual mouth into his actual words. So Steve, thank you so much for being with us and tell us a little bit about you.

Steve: 03:16 Well, thank you for thank you for having me on. And probably the most important part of what you said is you’ve been listening to Steve for so many years. So a large part of people working with me is they get a history lesson along with any information about coaching. So just a real short part of that story is I began my my teaching career in 1970s. And I was in an experimental program that had me student teaching for an entire year from September till June in a grade 4 classroom that had a master teacher, two student teachers, a graduate intern and visiting professors.

Kim: 04:08 Holy cow.

Steve: 04:09 I spent an entire year being observed and getting feedback every day straight through the year. So every day I taught a lesson, it ended with leaving the room with some adult and a cup of coffee, getting feedback on what had happened, getting out my lesson plan for the next day and making changes or modifications based on what I had just learned. And then I then I spent the the rest of the day watching other people teach and having similar conversations. So with that as an introduction to teaching, I then started teaching in a public school in New Jersey and I was in a open concept middle school. So that was four people working with a 100+ grade five and six kids in one large open room. And after five years of that, I transferred to teach first grade, which I team taught.

Steve: 05:05 So all of my teaching experience was always about working with other people, somebody else always seeing what was happening and having those conversations. When I became a teacher trainer and I began to travel to other schools, I was shocked to find how different my experience was from everyone else’s or for most people and to meet teachers and said in five years they hadn’t watched another teacher teach. So that’s what sent me down a career of focusing on peer coaching initially. Then I began to work with the training of mentors for beginning teachers, cooperating teachers for universities, beginning to train administrators in a coaching role. And then I was on the scene when the instructional coach movement hit. And so then I dug into study things from the instructional coaching side as well. But my initial focus was on creating environments where teachers coached teachers.

Kim: 06:16 I am so jealous of your early teaching career. I think so many teachers would have wished they could have been in that kind of situation because you get so isolated in your own classroom, in your own practice and you never have these opportunities to have these really deep conversations on a regular basis with your colleagues and perhaps experts, like you, had that amazing experience in your first year. How did all of that influence, obviously it influenced your choices hugely in getting you into peer coaching. Is there – do you feel, I’m not even sure what the question is. Do you feel like there’s a background that you bring to every conversation that you need to almost share with people when you get started?

Steve: 06:57 You know, the statement that I make in most of the work that I do is that I see teaching as a team sport. And in order to be on a team, you have to develop a high level of trust in the people you’re working with. And I can’t figure out how you can develop trust in people that you’ve never seen work. So the second element I talk is teaching has to be more of a public activity and I don’t mean public outside of school, but public inside the school. Today, the goals that teachers are being asked to achieve with students have become so complex that you really can’t approach it in an isolated single year scenario. So I do a lot of work with professional learning communities and I see peer coaching being a natural component of professional learning communities.

Steve: 08:01 So the teachers who are working and planning and assuming a responsibility for a group of students learning success have the opportunity to be in each other’s classrooms and learning from each other as part of that experience. And just a sideline on that – when you said that a lot of people would wish that, I just can’t believe that we can’t bring about the change that we need to bring about in teacher education at the university level. With what we know today in my head, people should be going out to student teach as a team. You know, the university, I’d be putting a group of four or five students together, sending them to the same site and having them spend that whole student teaching time functioning as a team. Because I believe if people had those experiences early on, then no matter what kind of setting they landed in, they would work to make those things happen. I don’t believe after my experience that you could have locked me in a room by myself. I would’ve made holes in the wall. But if you start the experience by teaching people that this is an isolated thing that you head off to do, then we shouldn’t be surprised that that’s how new people gravitate.

Clint: 09:24 How do you – I totally agree, and I think your early formative experiences as a student teacher really shaped your views and like Kim, I’m a little bit jealous because I know when I started as a public school teacher in Los Angeles in the 90s, I was in my little classroom all by myself, you know, and for me, I knew that that wasn’t what I needed and I needed more than that. But I think a lot of teachers maybe have gotten used to that privatization of their classroom and so almost feel threatened by the de-privatization depending on how it is sort of laid out for them. How do you work with teachers to maybe do that or in with coaches to do that in a non-threatening or in a less threatening way so that those teachers who are used to the privatization are actually welcoming and opening their doors rather than sometimes feeling like they’re barricading their doors. Because I think that’s what we hear from a lot of our coaches and aspiring coaches is how do I get in? How do I get that collaborative feel? How do I build that trust and those trusting relationships?

Steve: 10:37 So, I guess I want to respond to that from two directions. First of all, I would make sure I’m capturing all the new beginning teachers. So anyone who’s coming in new, I just did some mentor training and I’m real big on bringing together mentors with instructional coaches. So my suggestion is if you’re a mentor working with a beginning teacher, the first thing you should do is invite the instructional coach to coach the mentor and invite the beginning teacher to sit in on the process. So that as a mentor, the first thing I’m gonna model for you is my openness to being coached and the value of that coaching. And so I see instructional coaches and mentors doing a large part to set that stage. The next piece then, has to be the teacher leaders within the building. And you know, my example is, I came to a high school and they had had an instructional coach for I think three years.

Steve: 11:45 And I asked the principal, were there any department heads who had yet invite the instructional coach into their classrooms? And the principal informed me there were several and I said, how could they possibly still be instructional – how could they possibly still be school leaders? That, you know, to me, that ought to be an element of being a teacher leader. I worked – in the state of Iowa, they have funding for teacher leaders and school districts get extra money to pay a stipend to teachers for taking on leadership roles. And when I’ve worked with them on selecting those people and training those folks in the selection process, I said the most important thing to look at was vulnerability.

Steve: 12:38 A teacher leader is a person who will make him or herself vulnerable before the trust has been built. So why are you a teacher leader? Because you – student learning is so important to you that you would make yourself vulnerable. You would put your ego aside for the possibility that you might be able to learn something that would advance the cause for your students. And so administrators and instructional coaches working with leaders who stepped into those positions, I think is the ultimate way of beginning to change that picture for teachers. And the third part I would connect to that is, you have to begin to define student success as a team outcome rather than as an individual teacher outcome. So once I know that I can only be successful and once I know that I have responsibility for what’s happening in other classrooms, then I have no choice but to move into that area of vulnerability.

Kim: 13:58 Sorry, I’m writing down what you’re saying because like it’s all so critical. I think it is such an interesting point. Like, all of those are in all three of those are like, yes, yes, yes. I think the point about school leaders – that an essential element of being a successful school leader is that aspect of vulnerability and accepting that there might be a possibility that there is something you could learn. How do you help school leaders make that shift? Because many school leaders that Clint and I have worked with in our various experience in public and private school maybe don’t feel so much like they have something to learn or that maybe they don’t want to expose that vulnerability for themselves. How do you help people internalize the possibility that there is something they might learn?

Steve: 14:48 One is, you got to put the examples in front of them. So I am right now, I’m working with a high school and a middle school where the leadership team had me personally interview 15 teachers on the staff to develop the improvement plan for the leadership of the school. They’re doing that because I told them the story of a head of an international school who hired me to interview all the direct reports to the head of the school so that the head of the school could build his professional improvement plan for the coming year.

Steve: 15:35 When people in those roles step out and do things like that and model it for the school, the high school principal I’m working with, that will be his opening day with the staff. The very first day with the staff, one of the items he will be doing is presenting his professional growth plan for the year based upon the input, the feedback that came from staff. The phrase that I use with leaders is “you got model the model.” So, if you’re leadership in a school, you’ve gotta be taking on the behaviors that you’re looking for teachers to be taking on. As an instructional coach, you should be the most coached person in the building. Instructional coach should be receiving more – you know, every time an instructional coach does a model lesson, there ought to be somebody else observing a model lesson and providing the feedback. And allowing the teacher whose classroom you’re modeling the lesson in to sit in on the coach receiving the feedback and showing how you use that feedback, which is no different than what we need to be modeling for students. When a teacher can collect feedback from students on a lesson and redesign her instructional approach because of feedback she received from the kids, she’s doing the exact modeling that she wants the kids to do and having them open themselves up to feedback from their teacher and feedback from other students to guide their own learning. So beginning to present that as empowerment rather than as evaluation.

Kim: 17:17 I really like how you have sandwiched this – like, coming from above and coming from the grass roots. Like, you can change the culture of the school by having the highest level leaders model that they are willing to be vulnerable and then also have the coaches model that they’re being vulnerable like at the ground level as well. And I think that idea of making sure that it comes up from below and down from above, working in synergy is a really important element of that successful coaching culture.

Steve: 17:50 I’m working several international schools now with their leadership teams on presenting a culture of coaching. And one of the issues I keep putting in front of them is, are you building it into your hiring practice? So what question are you asking in your interview as to how open the teacher is to being observed by colleagues and getting feedback? My guess is anybody who wants that job is going to give you the answer that you want. Okay? Now that you’ve got the answer that you want, now you’re in a position two months into the school year to start holding them accountable to the answer they gave you back in the interview. And it’s all pieces like that that you begin to put together until you change the culture. So it’s getting your teacher leaders to step into these roles, getting new teachers to step into these roles, building it into your hiring practices. It’s having that mindset in your head that this is the culture we have to get to. You know, when I wrote the first book I wrote on coaching was quality teaching and a culture of coaching. So it was titled that for a very purposeful reason. I wanted people to see coaching not as an isolated activity, but as a culture, that you brought into the school.

Clint: 19:19 Earlier, you were talking about connecting those new teachers and I think when you were saying that, I think you were meaning new to the profession teachers and their mentors along with the instructional coaches and Kim and I both have lots of experience, much more experience in the international school world than in the – particularly in the US public school world and we have so much turnover and so much transients. We may have teachers who have worked for 15 years, but they are new to the school. And I think what’s a really exciting possibility in international schools in particular, is the ability to, like you were saying in those hiring practices, lay down your school’s stance on coaching and receiving coaching. And it doesn’t matter if you’ve been doing this for 15 years as the best, you know, standard level or higher level math teacher, the expectation is you are going to to become a part of this culture of coaching because that’s the culture that we have for everybody.

Steve: 20:14 I want to give you the best model I found in an international school of that. When a new person was hired, the first thing they were given were the names of two teachers on staff who were inviting them to coach them. Now that’s the reverse of what most schools would do. Most schools would go to a new teacher and say, here’s the name of two people who will help you out if you’re having trouble. Instead you walk in brand new, here’s the names of two teachers on staff who are inviting you to come to their classrooms and provide them with feedback. I can not think of a better way to send a message out about the culture of the school and I would call those two teachers, teacher leaders. So here’s two teachers and don’t know who you are, don’t know anything about you, but they’re willing to make themselves vulnerable for what they might gain from it, as well as making themselves vulnerable to communicate the kind of culture that a school wants to have.

Clint: 21:25 And it goes back to what you said, vulnerability before trust. A lot of times you show vulnerability after you gain trust, but that leadership role is –

Steve: 21:33 Absolutely. But see, you can’t build trust without somebody being vulnerable. If nobody’s – somebody’s got to go out on the branch and hand the saw over to someone else and then trust can be built. But if you never make yourself vulnerable – as a parent raising your kids, if you never give the kid the keys to the car and let them drive off, you’re making yourself vulnerable. Your child hasn’t done something yet to create that trust. You’ve got to create the experience for trust to be built. I can’t tell you the number of places I’ve worked and people say, well, we aren’t ready to have peer coaching here because we don’t have a trusting culture. My response is, you never will. It’s the peer coaching getting started that allow you to begin to build that trust factor present that you need. So leaders make themselves vulnerable to build trust. When a school principal says, here’s the names of 15 people, I want you to call up and interview them about how I could improve, that’s making yourself pretty vulnerable. When the head of a school says, here’s all the people who are direct reports to me, call those people up and ask them about how I could improve. And if you take the same thing back to the classroom, it’s a teacher who could make herself vulnerable to her students that caused the students to begin to risk making themselves vulnerable. Back to the teacher

Clint: 23:07 You came to visit a school that I was working at – must’ve been almost 10 years ago now in in Vietnam. And we were talking about peer coaching at the time. And I remember something that you said distinctly, you said exactly, you said you have to start with your heads of department and it’s not the heads of department and going in and offering coaching. It’s them inviting those teachers in and it might even be, again, something that really sticks in my memory. If I’m the head of department and I have an idea of maybe something for you to think about, that’s what I’m going to ask you to also look at in my work as well so that we can now start a conversation, but I’ve started it with my vulnerability around that and getting your ideas. And that’s something that’s really stuck with me as I’ve progressed through the years and thinking about how I work with teachers and how you can invite that conversation rather than forced that conversation.

Steve: 24:04 Yep. See, I share, I don’t need the best science teacher to be head of the department. I need the person who’s most comfortable sitting down at a department meeting, laying out a lab that you did with kids that didn’t get the results you wanted to get and lead four or five people in the department in a conversation about how you might change or alter your approach so that you’re now opening the door for somebody else to engage in that same conversation.

Clint: 24:37 Yeah, we often conflate expertise with being the right person for the job. Joanne Killion and I and I have have had this conversation that, I’m sorry – Joellen Killion and I have had the conversation that very often expertise gets in the way of coaching. It’s frequently easier to coach outside the area of expertise. So very often, in a high school when I’m introduced to coaching, peer coaching, I suggest that they start by coaching people outside their department because it’s actually less threatening. I am more comfortable that you’ll stay in that coaching role. Now, there’s times that I want to go to the expert for things that the expert knows, but in my mind when I’m working with an expert, my coaching actually gets closer to mentoring. I’m telling you, I don’t know enough about this and I need you to teach me and help you with it.

Steve: 25:38 Different from peer coaching, where the only feedback I’m giving a person in peer coaching is feedback that they themselves requested. And instructional coaches find themselves in both of those roles and so they need to learn how to communicate with the teacher, which role are you asking me to be in? I was doing a coaching session with the library and media specialist in an international school and she and I were modeling it for a larger audience. And about halfway through the post conference, she changed the request from me peer coaching to me taking on more of an expert role. And it was so cool that I can actually stop, call time-out and point out to the audience what had happened and point out to the person I was coaching what had happened. You’ve just asked me to switch roles and I’m willing to switch roles, but I want you to understand that I’m switching roles because you requested it. Not because I took off the peer coaching hat and put on the expert hat.

Clint: 26:52 And she was unaware of that shift in that conversation.

Steve: 26:55 Yes. It just naturally shifted to her desire to know something that I knew and wanting me to play that role rather than to stay in just a colleague brainstorming with her. She wanted the expertise. So some coaches make the mistake of using the – become the expert when the teacher wants you to because they’re trained not to be the expert and I agree with that totally. But, you infuriate a teacher if I think you know something and you’re holding back from giving me this piece that you know. So you have to create that structure that they can put the request out and then I can step into it. Or I can even ask them, you know, I’ve done quite a substantial study in that area. Are you interested in knowing more? I’m happy to share that with you. It kind of steps outside of the pre-conference we had and what initially you were asking me to do, but I’m happy to shift these roles with you if that’s what you’d like. And most teachers are extremely happy at that time because now they’ve decided they want to know. It’s not you coming in with your expertise and telling them they should know. Your coaching, caused them to get to the point that they want to know more now. They’ve discovered their own desire.

Kim: 28:15 You totally hit the nail on the head with the teachers feeling infuriated by the probing questions when they know the other person actually knows the answer. And I think that’s sometimes why coaching gets a bad rap, right? Because teachers have had these long drawn out conversations where they know the other person can just guide them in the right direction, but the other person is trying so hard to do a good job coaching, nothing is done with malintent. Right? But they’re just working at cross purposes. So I think that understanding that in that position there are multiple roles that you fill and that there needs to be clarity and structure for how you can transition from one to the other is so critical. And I think – I worry, in particularly in schools in the Asia region, that that is getting lost because of how much interest there is in peer coaching and there is so much interest in the cognitive coaching model for example, and everyone can be a coach and there’s like a resistance to having this structure for coaching because we want to make it this like, we have a culture of coaching and everybody can coach each other.

Kim: 29:22 Do you have any thoughts on that?

Steve: 29:24 You’ll be able to catch my thoughts on Kim’s question in the startup to part two of this interview. Thanks for listening.

Steve [Outro]: 29:41 Thanks again for listening. You can subscribe to Steve Barkley Ponders Out Loud on iTunes and Podbean and please remember to rate and review us on iTunes. I also want to hear what you’re pondering. You can find me on twitter @stevebarkley or send me your questions and find my videos and blogs at barkleypd.com.